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There have been many articles lately about how SpaceX fuels their rockets, and how it will apply when they start launching people. Traditionally, fueling is completed first, then people board the rocket. This way, people aren't stuck inside the spaceship in case a bad accident happens during fueling, as happened to the last (cargo-only) Falcon 9.

SpaceX, however, fuels the rockets as close to launch as possible. This is because they super-cool the fuel, and want to leave as little time as possible for the fuel to boil off before launch. SpaceX plans to have people board the spaceship before fueling the rocket because of this.

There have been many, manyarticles written about NASA not liking this plan. But I believe that SpaceX's plan is actually safer. The people board the rocket when the rocket contains no fuel. There's no arguing that this step is safer than boarding the rocket while it is already full of fuel. In addition, there will be support personnel to help astronauts board the rocket, and those people are also placed in danger. So this first part of the process is safer for both the astronauts and the support personnel than the traditional process.

SpaceX then fuels the rocket after the people have boarded. This part is inherently more dangerous, but at least at this point the danger is only to the astronauts - no support personnel are in danger. So it does put fewer people at risk. In addition, I believe this risk is offset by having the people on a Dragon spacecraft - a spacecraft with the ability to perform a powered abort. If an anomaly is detected (such as the "fast fire" that took out the last rocket), the Dragon can launch away from the rest of the rocket, saving the crew and cargo. I think in the end that SpaceX's proposed process will prove to be safer than the traditional boarding process.

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M3OC Supporting Member

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Relaunch, Relanding, Satelite delivery, Farrings landed; Job done!!!!! Amazing day. They are going to use six more this year and want to turn around boosters in a day by next year. Cost could drop by a factor of 100. Elon working on saving our planet and opening up the solar system for our kids. H.. S..!!

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Editted my cmment as I hadnt seen what Elon said during the press conference. Said the farrings have boosters and cotrolable chutes. They landed in the ocean this time. They havent said if they were recovered. Elon said that they will land on a bouncy castle in the future and be reused as they cost six million. I guess some kind of inflatable barge? Also said might try to recover second stage.

Really?
Interesting. I know at some point he said that they weren't going to bother trying to recover the Falcon 9 second stage - that they'd wait to implement second stage recovery for a follow-on rocket.

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He said it in a half joking tone. If you miss and it blows up it was going to blow up anyway. A lot of comments on reddit about how they need to do this to get to rapid reusability. Press conference on youtube if you are interested.

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So I was really surprised not to see a thread on this yet, but how many people are going to the Falcon Heavy event, or preordered tickets?

I'm really bummed right now, and still trying to decide what to do. I'm in Florida this week, and really wanted to see the Falcon Heavy Launch, so preordered tickets before the targeted date was set. Desperately hoping (irrationally as it may have been) that the launch might slip into this next week. Unfortunately with the targeted date set on February 6th now, it would require me to extend my trip 5 days, and I don't know if that is going to fly with the fam.

I talked myself into it as the closer package was only $15 more than a daily admission (at the time, appears to have gone down $10 in the last few days), and it came with a 2 day admission, so figured I was only out a little cash if I missed it and could use the ticket part whenever. Then talked myself into the Closest package.

Anyway end of the story, I've got 6 Closest Package tickets and 2 parking passes that I'm not sure what I'm going to do with yet. I may get to ebaying pretty soon, or maybe offer them up to any interested forum members first. Still deciding.

So who actually gets to go? I saw it looked like Trevor might have changed his mind from not going earlier in the week.

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Iowa is outside of the blast radius in case there’s an accident. Safer to go home and watch the livestream.

All kidding aside, there are SO MANY variables when it comes to rocket launches let alone the very first launch of a new design, you will end up rescheduling your entire life and risk triggering a divorce from your wife only for an event that can get delayed further due to weather or technical stuff. Unless you’re you you xue and have no family and no commitments, life has to go on!

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Yeah, that was the other thing I was afraid of. Even if we were able to rework everything to be available on the date, a cancellation at that point would really suck. They have the other Falcon 9 going off on Thursday 1/30 right now too, and that would still be pretty cool. I might have missed tickets for that though, but sounds like we can watch from the Kennedy Space center just with an admission.

ModeratorM3OC Supporting Member

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So I was really surprised not to see a thread on this yet, but how many people are going to the Falcon Heavy event, or preordered tickets?

I'm really bummed right now, and still trying to decide what to do. I'm in Florida this week, and really wanted to see the Falcon Heavy Launch, so preordered tickets before the targeted date was set. Desperately hoping (irrationally as it may have been) that the launch might slip into this next week. Unfortunately with the targeted date set on February 6th now, it would require me to extend my trip 5 days, and I don't know if that is going to fly with the fam.

I talked myself into it as the closer package was only $15 more than a daily admission (at the time, appears to have gone down $10 in the last few days), and it came with a 2 day admission, so figured I was only out a little cash if I missed it and could use the ticket part whenever. Then talked myself into the Closest package.

Anyway end of the story, I've got 6 Closest Package tickets and 2 parking passes that I'm not sure what I'm going to do with yet. I may get to ebaying pretty soon, or maybe offer them up to any interested forum members first. Still deciding.

So who actually gets to go? I saw it looked like Trevor might have changed his mind from not going earlier in the week.

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Damn!

I’ll be on a work trip that gets back home to Florida on the red eye first thing in the morning on the 7th. Would have been awesome to take delivery of the Model 3 and immediately drive up for the launch!!